Deadly Web (37 page)

‘I wasn’t even there,’ Max responded. ‘He was a good student – of magic – the best one. I could talk to Cem about anything – my fears, my enthusiasms. He had a tremendous hunger for the mysteries – once, of course, I’d sorted him out as regards useless concepts like good and evil. He went willingly to perform the rite and he died. He gave me the western portal as a gift.’

‘So you knew . . .’

‘Of course I did! Cem and I planned it together.’ He closed his eyes. ‘But I’m tired now and disinclined to answer any more questions.’

‘Well, you’ll have to later!’

Max opened his eyes briefly and replied, ‘I don’t think so. I will tell you only that my grand ritual, using my own blood, as you saw—’

‘That was tomato juice!’

‘Get it tested and see,’ Max smiled. ‘My working is over and the city is safe. Gülay Arat was a willing victim – what a naughty place that Atlas Pasaj is, introducing young ladies to the Devil! Silly people looking ridiculous in black, as I told Gülay. It so delighted her when she learned what I did, what I could teach her. She wanted and welcomed what came into the world through me. But little Lale was a good Muslim and was very afraid; even when I attempted to reassure her she fought. It was very ugly to watch. The gypsy was, of course, a mistake. Foul blood. I knew I’d have to pay for it in some way, which is, of course, why you’re here. But the ritual is nevertheless complete and that is the main thing. I’m telling you these details, Çetin, while I can,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll have fun beating the rest out of Turgut. I know you’re on to İrfan Şay, but . . . Oh, and by the way, just for the record, Ülkü Ayla is a complete innocent in all this and, should you find her, I would like it if you could be kind to her. Poor little girl, I sacrificed her too in a way . . . Now if you don’t mind . . .’ He leaned back against the cabin of the launch and closed his eyes.

‘What about the other blood, Max, the blood that wasn’t yours?’

‘Oh, that’s so easy, Çetin,’ the magician smiled. ‘Where do you think I got it?’

‘I, well . . .’

‘Dad . . .’

İkmen turned round sharply to see his daughter’s slightly raised face looking up at him. It was extremely white and there was a deadness in her eyes that was totally unfamiliar to him. İkmen looked down at the cuff around his wrist and said to Süleyman, ‘Can you . . . ?’

‘Of course.’ He went over to Gonca and gently took Çiçek from her.

‘Mehmet?’

‘Yes, you’re OK now, Çiçek,’ he said as he smoothed the unaccustomed blonde hair from her face. ‘I’m here, and your father. There’s nothing to be afraid of any more.’

As the lights of the Eminönü docks and the imperial mosques and palaces behind them came into view, İkmen studied the apparently sleeping face of Max Esterhazy closely. How could he have known and yet not known this man so completely? And what had happened to make him, suddenly, take the action that he had? Was it the impending conflict in the region? Was he so afraid that it would change his life that he felt he had to kill in order to prevent it? Or had it all just been a purely commercial act punctuated by stupid costumes and sleight-of-hand parlour tricks? İkmen more than most knew that magic, whatever it was, possessed some power. In a way he knew he was relieved that Max had completed his ritual, because if he hadn’t İkmen didn’t know what that inconclusion might produce.

And what of Alison? He had never dreamed that she’d felt like that about him! And why had it affected Max so badly? Alison had been lovely, but she was just a girl like millions of others . . . But then maybe that had more to do with Max’s past than Alison herself; maybe the key to that lay in what the magician’s father had been and the ambiguity that appeared to surround that. On one level, Max almost certainly did want to do good, to protect the city – maybe even make up for some of the dreadful things that, perhaps, his father had done. But there was also an element of fury there too. His woman had preferred someone he considered inferior and he’d never been able to get over it. Turks were maybe in their place as occasional friends and servants – which brought to mind Ülkü Ayla and the assertion of innocence Max had made for her. Was she truly innocent or was this yet another of Max’s games? Time and some hard interviewing would, he hoped, produce an answer.

They pulled into the shore and İkmen and the pilot took an apparently sleeping Max Esterhazy to the waiting police car.

İkmen had Max and Turgut Can taken down to the cells while he took Çiçek to hospital.

‘We’ll interview them both in the morning,’ he said to Süleyman as he took his leave of him.

‘It is morning, Çetin.’

İkmen shrugged. ‘When I get back then,’ he said, and then added with a smile, ‘You’d better go home and change, Mehmet. I think that suit is now beyond human intervention.’

Süleyman, who had up until now almost forgotten about his waterlogged appearance, smiled.

When İkmen had gone, Çöktin turned to Süleyman and said, ‘Sir, who is this Alison?’

‘Oh, just someone,’ Süleyman said wearily. ‘The inspector and Esterhazy knew her years ago.’

‘Oh.’

‘You’d better go home for a few hours too, İsak,’ Süleyman said. ‘It’s been a terrible night and we will, I am sure, have to listen to yet more horror later. Go home, clean up and I’ll call you. Oh, and,’ he placed his hand on his deputy’s already retreating back, ‘thank you for what you did tonight. You probably saved my life.’

Çöktin, as if embarrassed, put his head down. ‘Sir.’

Süleyman watched him go and then started to make his way up to his office to complete the necessary paperwork. This had to be done and so the ruined suit and squelching shoes would have to wait for a while at least. If nothing else, he thought grimly, my appearance will give people something to talk about.

He’d just started to mount the stairs when he heard the commotion down below. Raised voices together with the sound of running feet made him retrace his steps a few paces. It sounded as if the noise was coming from the cells. Mentally he went over all the precautions he had taken to ensure that neither of the prisoners could harm themselves. They’d been very thorough. But then again what happened to prisoners once they were ‘down there’ was something he couldn’t legislate for. Not everyone was like himself and İkmen, and Esterhazy, at least, was being held on suspicion of murder. He made his way down to the cells and pushed his way through what seemed like thousands of constables.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked one of the men that he knew by sight.

‘Prisoner’s dead, sir.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes.’

Even before he got to the door of the cell, he knew it was Max. On the launch there had been something strangely final in his manner. He didn’t remember now what the magician had actually said, but then maybe it hadn’t been to do with anything as overt as speech.

He pushed the cell door open and saw Max, motionless on the floor, a very young constable pumping half-heartedly at his chest.

‘Have you called the doctor?’ He squatted down beside the body and pushed the young man out of the way.

‘No.’

‘Well, do so! Now!’

‘Yes, sir.’ The young man stood up and ran towards the door.

Süleyman pinched the magician’s nose between his fingers and blew into his mouth. He then pumped on his chest for several seconds before resuming his place at the man’s head again. As he pinched his nose for a second time, Max’s eyes flew open and for just a split second, Süleyman thought he saw a smile cross his blueing lips.

‘Allah!’

But then in a blink of an eye the effect had disappeared and the magician was just like a great, blue and grey stone once again. Süleyman continued working on what he knew in his heart was a dead body until, after what seemed like a lifetime, the doctor arrived.

Çiçek İkmen was strangely animated, given her ordeal. She wasn’t, of course, her usual lively self, and her father was insistent that she remain in hospital and submit to medical tests, but she wanted to talk and he felt it was important to listen to her.

‘What was the fortune-teller doing on the boat?’ she asked him as she gazed, now firmly, into her father’s face.

‘It’s a long story, Çiçek,’ İkmen replied. ‘What happened to you, my soul?’

She saw the tears in his eyes and she squeezed his hand encouragingly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I met your friend Max. We had a drink.’

‘Where?’

‘At the Kaktüs,’ she said, naming a friendly, literary and arty bar just off İstiklal Caddesi.

‘Why? Why did you go with him?’ Now his guilt was beginning to manifest itself, making İkmen feel slightly sick. Max had said he ‘wanted’ Çiçek, that he admired her ‘magical’ personality. Why hadn’t İkmen even considered this as a possibility?

‘I was depressed,’ Çiçek said. ‘Dad, I made a fool of myself with Mehmet.’

İkmen’s heart jumped. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I haven’t done anything,’ she said. ‘I just went and told him how I felt.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No.’

‘Probably too embarrassed,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t know what possessed me to do it, Dad! He asked me why I was looking so down and so I told him. I don’t know why.’

For some reason that İkmen balked at attributing to Max’s sigil, Çiçek had behaved in an impulsive fashion that was not natural to her. Gonca had said that magicians put a lot of effort into these sigils and so they were very powerful at doing whatever the practitioner wanted them to do. Had Max really taken control of Çiçek, manipulated her into a position where she would confide in and trust him without thinking?

‘What happened then?’

‘Then nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘Then the fortune-teller on the boat and you and . . . and Mehmet . . . And there was hair too, on my head, blonde . . .’

‘It was a wig, little pigeon.’

‘Oh.’

The door opened and a small man in a white coat entered.

‘Here’s the doctor,’ İkmen said. ‘I just need to speak to him before he sees you.’

He then walked over to the small man and led him outside where he gave him a brief overview of events.

‘It was as if she were hypnotised,’ he said in conclusion. ‘The man in question spoke to her and she opened her eyes.’

‘But she now remembers nothing of the events on the boat?’

‘No.’

The doctor shrugged. ‘It is unusual for a person to recall nothing from their experience of hypnotic trance,’ he said. ‘I certainly have never come across such a thing. Maybe the trauma has caused temporary amnesia. I will examine your daughter and also perform a blood test.’

‘For drugs?’

‘Yes. Although the way she came round would seem to suggest that your daughter was in a hypnotic state, that could just be coincidental.’

‘You mean he gave her a drug, knowing approximately when it would wear off?’

‘Maybe. It seems likely from what you have told me that if a drug were administered to her, that happened in the bar. My guess would be that if she was given anything it was probably Rohypnol, which renders those ingesting it both pliable and at least temporarily amnesic.’

‘I have heard of it,’ İkmen said with a sigh. ‘Men give it to girls and then . . .’

‘Rape them, yes,’ the doctor said very matter-of-factly. ‘But I warn you that we may never know. Rohypnol clears the system very quickly and so I don’t know whether the blood test will be very illuminating.’

İkmen let the doctor in to Çiçek and then went outside to have a smoke. Metin İskender was still recovering from his bullet wound somewhere else in the building. As his condition had improved, staff had moved him to another part of the hospital. İkmen had never visited – too busy. Terrible! Metin had almost died, but because Max had had them all whirling around in circles with his sigils and portals and books featuring goat-headed men, İkmen hadn’t once been to visit him. Max had shot him, it seemed, because Metin must have interrupted him as he searched for Çiçek’s sigil. Where had he got the gun?

Max had really planned all this. But had he done so before or after he’d come into contact with İrfan Şay? How, indeed, and where had he met Şay? Had he done so before or after he’d planned to execute his ritual? And what of the overendowed Goat of Mendes images on the places of worship? That, it now seemed, had just simply amused him and he could have just dismissed it to İkmen as the nonsense that it was. But he hadn’t because İkmen’s appearance had, it seemed, proved just too fortunate and tempting to miss. Revenge – thirty years on! Or was it? The surreal quality of his recent experiences on the Bosphorus coupled with his tiredness made İkmen question what was real and what wasn’t. Alison had been on the boat but it hadn’t been Alison, it had been Çiçek. Max had sliced off his own hand before his eyes – except that he hadn’t. Magician and illusionist seemed to be a more accurate title for Max Esterhazy now – or maybe he was and always had been just the latter . . .

İkmen switched his mobile phone back on and waited to see whether he had any messages. He did, but only one, from Süleyman.

It was a bizarre sight. One man in robes, another, leaning against the cell door, his clothes reeking of seawater, and the third man, exhausted beyond craziness, shouting his every utterance.

‘So Max caught you wanking over his books! What then?’ İkmen said.

Turgut Can slumped still further down into his seat. Maybe, Süleyman observed, he was trying to get as far away as he could from İkmen’s furious questioning. But with Max now dead they had to find out as much as they could in any way that was open to them and that included from Turgut Can.

‘That was months ago. He threatened me, with magic. Max Bey frightened me.’

‘He was a magician, it’s what he did!’ İkmen shouted. ‘You shouldn’t have got involved with him! Why did you?’

‘I told you, he frightened me. And he offered me money.’